Wildebeest and Valley

Choreographer and performer Omer Backley-Astrachan sees dance as a language – a form of communication “to be witnessed and reflected”.

Such is the challenge of contemporary dance. It requires an empathetic, compliant audience, willing to yield to the to the messages expressed, and prepared to translate and interpret them based on their own experience … and perhaps a brief suggestion from the choreographer.

In this ‘double bill’ of his work, Omer Backley-Astrachan has explored differing aspects of human relationships using choreography that is both sensitive and perceptive.

In Wildebeest, Backley-Astrachan looks at “the artifice of social behaviour through a distillation of human interactions”.

He establishes a small world where his performers are brought together in intricately expressed movement, then separated by distance and stillness. Stripped of the façade of costume or finery, they are alone, reaching out across barren space, some searching, some tempting. They make contact, or are rejected. Such is the